Book description
In the roaring twenties Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in
the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, celebrity
scandals, and religious fervor. It was also rife with organized crime,
with a mayor in the pocket of the syndicates and a DA taking bribes to
throw trials. In A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner
narrates the entwined lives of two men, Dave Clark and Leslie White,
who were caught up in the crimes, murders, and swindles of the day.
Over a few transformative years, as the boom times shaded into
the Depression, the adventures of Clark and White would inspire pulp
fiction and replace L. A.'s reckless optimism with a new cynicism.
Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine got noir.
When A Bright and Guilty Place begins, Leslie White is a
naïve young photographer who lands a job as a crime-scene investigator
in the L. A. district attorney's office. There he meets Dave Clark, a
young, movie-star handsome lawyer and a rising star prosecutor with
big ambitions. The cases they tried were some of the first
"trials of the century," starring dark-hearted oil barons,
sexually perverse starlets, and hookers with hearts of gold. Los
Angeles was in the grip of organized crime, and White was dismayed to
see that only the innocent paid while the powerful walked free. But
Clark was entranced by L. A.'s dangerous lures and lived the high
life, marrying a beautiful woman, wearing custom-made suits, yachting
with the rich and powerful, and jaunting off to Mexico for gambling
and girls. In a shocking twist, when Charlie Crawford, the Al Capone
of L. A., was found dead, the chief suspect was none other than golden
boy Dave Clark.
A Bright and Guilty Place is narrative non-fiction at its most
gripping. Richard Rayner portrays an L. A. controlled by organized
crime, where brutal murders, spectacular trials, political misdeeds,
and the sexual perversities of Hollywood starlets are chronicled in
graphic detail in the tabloids; where writers like Raymond Chandler
and Dashiell Hammett transformed a dark reality into gripping fiction;
and whose events would inspire the shadowy L. A. of film noir.
